what teachers want

"Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--" Poe, The Raven.

Now you see why I do what I do: even Poe's speaker in The Raven is "nearly napping." Books cause sleepiness. Burn the books, and end the controversary. As Hume said, "commit them to the flames."

So you ask rhetorically, 'how did you as an english teacher, come to be the leader of book burning?' First, the students hate reading. And we all hate these textbooks, prettily packaged with meaningless standards, overheads, and meaningless activities.

Whoever controls the printing press owns the world. So put a cog in the wheel of the machinery. Include the computer in the mix. The printer, the Internet, the blog--away from the written word and its condescension over the verbal, tribal, communal world!! Oh cruel, blog, farewell forever.

Why do we teachers in general lie about being in control? We are not in control. We try to show that we are disciplinarians of our classrooms, and when we clearly are not, we feel depressed and culpable--when in reality, discipline is a school wide concern. When a student is interfering with the learning of others, he/she needs to stop or leave the room. And of course this means that students need to be sent somewhere else, and this involves the administration. And it needs to protect the learning environment of the classroom not the student and his/her parents.